Blood Line (A Tom Rollins Thriller Book 1) Paul Heatley (10 best novels of all time .txt) 📖

Saturday morning. Seth Goldberg gets out of the shower, dries, combs his hair, gets dressed and goes downstairs. His wife and his daughters are in the kitchen, at the table, waiting for him.

The girls are happy to see him. They’ve missed him while he’s been in Washington. Abigail has told him they tried to stay up for his return last night, but tiredness got the better of them. They smile up at him as he enters the kitchen, joins them at the table.

“Morning,” he says, then kisses them each on the cheek.

“Morning, Daddy,” they each say after their kiss, the younger echoing the older.

The girls wear matching peach-colored dresses. Seth is in his black suit. Abigail wears her sky-blue dress. Seth smiles at it. “My favorite,” he says.

She smiles back, tinged with sadness. He knows why. She’s worried about him. Worried about them all. “I thought you’d appreciate it,” she says.

“I certainly do,” Seth says. To the girls, “Doesn’t Mommy look like the most beautiful woman in all the world?”

“Always!” Deborah says. Danielle giggles.

They have breakfast. The girls, as ever, lean forward over their plates, are careful not to get crumbs on themselves. Seth notices Danielle is getting better at staying clean. When they finish eating, this time he doesn’t have to wipe her face clean, pick the detritus from her hair.

Abigail clears the table, places the dishes in the sink. “Shall we go?” she says.

They gather themselves up and leave the house. The agents assigned to watch them are patiently waiting. They know the routine. They’ve been expecting this. They speak into their wrists as Seth and Abigail strap their children into their seats.

The reporters parked across the street have been expecting them, too. Seth can hear the snapping of their cameras. They’ll follow them, but the bodyguards make sure they keep their distance. At a glance, Seth notices there are more there now than there used to be. The further along his clean energy bill gets, the more everyone wants to take his picture.

They pull away, following the agent car in the lead, boxed in by another behind them. They make their way to synagogue, to Shabbat; No doubt the crowds will be waiting there, too. To take his picture, to congratulate him, to encourage him, or else to call him the devil.

The same routine.

The synagogue.

Every week.

Every Saturday morning.

Senator Seth Goldberg and his family leave their home, leave their neighborhood, unaware that they are marked for death in less than two hours.

63

Tom is in Dallas. After he’d finished with the Right Arm, he found a message on the burner phone from Ben. It had one word.

Shot.

After that was a sequence of letters and numbers. Tom knew what they were. He had been in the army long enough to recognize a set of coordinates at a glance.

Tom didn’t go straight to them. He went to Ben’s house first. He wasn’t there long. He parked down the road, out of view, looked through binoculars. The house was being watched. The men in the cars, trying to look nondescript, had the obvious bearing of agents, just like Ben the first time Tom saw him. They were waiting for him, for Tom. The house did not look like a crime scene. It looked like it always did.

Ben, Tom knew, was more than likely dead.

He didn’t stay in the neighborhood. He’s destroyed the burner phone that had Ben’s number, disposed of it. He’s memorized the coordinates and looked them up.

A warehouse, downtown.

He’s on his way.

64

“So Carly’s dead, huh?” Chuck says, gearing up.

“We think so,” Jake says. “There’s no sign of her at home.”

“Shame,” Chuck says, though he doesn’t look particularly perturbed. “She was a fine piece of ass.”

“I’ll be sure to eulogize her thusly,” Jake says.

They’re in the warehouse. The mercs are getting ready. Their arms are bare and adorned with fake tattoos, Nazi imagery. There are swastikas and some of the more subtle images and numbers, too.

The van is loaded. Jake has looked into the back of it. Felt himself shudder. Couldn’t help it. The mercs are surprisingly cool about the whole situation despite the fact that if this thing were to go boom, it would wipe out the whole district. Of course, they’ve been living with it, sleeping near it, for the last couple of weeks. Jake knows he couldn’t. Jake doesn’t want to be near it right now. He shouldn’t be. It was never in the plan. The stuff with Ben has changed things. He’s here with a couple of other agents, men he can trust, men who have also been recruited by Eric, who know what’s going down.

Chuck straps body armor across his chest. “So the Right Arm, you’re saying they’re dead now?”

“Most of them,” Jake says. They’ve been aware of what was happening in the area, in Harrow, though they didn’t understand it. A gang war? Internal strife? They’ve been waiting for it to calm down. Now, so close to their plan coming to fruition, Jake sent one of their agents around town, to search them out. He came up empty-handed. The ones supposed to still be alive, he couldn’t find them.

Jake can’t shake the feeling it has something to do with Ben’s mysterious friend.

He’s done his own research. He looked into the unofficial undercover, into Anthony Rollins. Found out all about his brother, Tom. Ex-army. Ex-CIA. Currently wanted for going AWOL. Whereabouts unknown. It might be nothing, it could be something. Jake has circulated this information, in either case.

“So, you gonna set up some new patsies, or what?” Chuck says.

“No time,” Jake says. “But it doesn’t matter. This will work in our favor. They were all gonna get wiped out anyway, once the finger of blame settled on them. This way, we’ve already got the bodies and saved ourselves a firefight to get them.”

Chuck grins. “So long as it all works out, huh?”

“We’ve planned too long and too hard to be derailed now.”

“What about Ben’s mystery friend? You think he’s gonna come find us?”

“Waste anyone